Hungary in the Great War and Total Propaganda. Review of: Bertényi, Ifj. I., Boka, L., & Katona, A. (Eds.). (2016). Propaganda: politika, hétköznapi és magas kultúra, művészet és média a nagy háborúban [Propaganda: Politics, Everyday Life and High Culture, Arts and Media in the Great War]. Budapest: Országos Széchényi Könyvtár. 542 p., ill.

Abstract

In many countries of Europe, the years between 2014 to 2016 marked the 100 th anniversary of World War I also known as the Great War. Hungary is one of the states which suffered catastrophic losses in this global military conflict. It joined the war as an equal part of a big composite monarchy and eventually, in accordance with the peace treaties signed in 1920 in Versailles, lost two thirds of its territory, turned into a virtually monoethnic state and found itself surrounded by hostile powers. In this regard, it is clear why the Great War is of considerable importance for the contemporary humanities and Hungarian society. Recently, dozens of exhibitions and scholarly conferences have been organised all over the country. This article considers the proceedings of a representative interdisciplinary forum where Hungarian historians, literary historians, and art historians examined the phenomenon of propaganda, formulated the task taxonomising its forms, or mechanisms of influencing the population, control over the written press and media, formation of public opinion, intellectuals’ attitude to the war and studying of the propaganda message of material objects — from monuments in public spaces to utensils and souvenirs. The authors of the work reviewed come to the conclusion that if war and propaganda have been interconnected since the wars of religion of the early modern period, the total war which erased the division line between the front and the rear, and total propaganda, which turned texts, images, visual, and material objects surrounding people in their everyday life into patriotic messages, first appear in their full form in the early twentieth century. It seems that the conclusion most of the authors come to is that the memory of the Great War was replaced by the trauma after the collapse of the multinational empire, and historians in their case studies and comprehensive works have to measure the extent to which propaganda influenced mass and individual consciousness of the Great War generation.